Exhale

The Oatmeal is a guy who creates funny, insightful, very weird and often profane comics, books, etc. It shifts between real life events, pop culture, life commentary and  has much cat related content. It's very popular with the millenial generation. 

The latest comic he did was on creativity (disclaimer: profanity ahead) and he nailed it. He compares creativity to breathing. Creating things is exhaling. It is something you feel compelled to do to live. You obviously won't literally die if you don't exhale and create, but you're definitely uncomfortable and not feeling alive in the fullest sense. 

So how do we inhale then? Inhaling is the inspiration, the feeding of our soul that Al and Vickie spoke about in their presentation at Deepening Community. It's finding our moral oxygen. The stuff that fills us up and making sure we breath it in regularly. We also must learn to distinguish this from motivation which can give us a quick hit, but doesn't have enough oxygen in it to allow us to exhale for very long.